Paul Theroux quote: "Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art."

Winter is a season of recovery and preparation.
PAUL THEROUX

When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make ...
PAUL THEROUX

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.
PAUL THEROUX

Travel magazines are just one cupcake after another. They're not about travel. The travel magazi...
PAUL THEROUX

When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and ...
PAUL THEROUX

An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up a...
PAUL THEROUX

Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, or the details of their lives, my pati...
PAUL THEROUX

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
PAUL THEROUX

A place that doesn't welcome tourists, that's really difficult and off the map, is a place I...
PAUL THEROUX

Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.
PAUL THEROUX

Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mut...
PAUL THEROUX

I am happy being what I am.
PAUL THEROUX

I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and...
PAUL THEROUX

I think I am typical in believing that the Peace Corps trained us brilliantly and then did little mo...
PAUL THEROUX

Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Neth...
PAUL THEROUX

You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw u...
PAUL THEROUX

The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in t...
PAUL THEROUX

Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound exte...
PAUL THEROUX

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say th...
PAUL THEROUX

I believe I have a sunny disposition, and am not naturally a grouch. It takes a lot of optimism, aft...
PAUL THEROUX

The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something - a lands...
PAUL THEROUX

There are two worlds: the world of the tourist and the world of everyone else. Often they're sid...
PAUL THEROUX

Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certai...
PAUL THEROUX

What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set of...
PAUL THEROUX

I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new ...
PAUL THEROUX

Africa is really a place for the wealthy traveler. It's got some nice hotels, but they're ve...
PAUL THEROUX

I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look, to me, illiterate. They look hasty, like someone bab...
PAUL THEROUX

A journey awakens all our old fears of danger and risk. Your life is on the line. You are living by ...
PAUL THEROUX

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a go...
PAUL THEROUX

Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter.
PAUL THEROUX

My record was so bad that I was first rejected by the Peace Corps as a poor risk and possible troubl...
PAUL THEROUX

A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it's usually a book abou...
PAUL THEROUX

Television cannot film corruption. Television cannot spend five days on a rattling railway train, ta...
PAUL THEROUX

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
PAUL THEROUX

Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow r...
PAUL THEROUX

Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us.
PAUL THEROUX

Nyasaland was the perfect country for a volunteer. It was friendly and destitute; it was small and o...
PAUL THEROUX

The United States is a world unto itself. We have mountains, we have deserts, we have a river that e...
PAUL THEROUX

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
PAUL THEROUX

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
PAUL THEROUX

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contract...
PAUL THEROUX

Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.
PAUL THEROUX

My earliest thought, long before I was in high school, was just to go away, get out of my house, get...
PAUL THEROUX

Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny m...
PAUL THEROUX

Although I'm not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversatio...
PAUL THEROUX

The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.
PAUL THEROUX

Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rura...
PAUL THEROUX

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.
PAUL THEROUX

I was raised in a large family. The first reason for my travel was to get away from my family. I kne...
PAUL THEROUX

I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distr...
PAUL THEROUX

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a tra...
PAUL THEROUX

I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the pap...
PAUL THEROUX

You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn&#...
PAUL THEROUX

What strikes me about high-school reunions is the realization that these are people one has known on...
PAUL THEROUX

The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.
PAUL THEROUX

When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there.
PAUL THEROUX

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation; and travel, so broadening at first, contrac...
PAUL THEROUX

It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians
PAUL THEROUX

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation; and travel, so broadening at first, contract...
PAUL THEROUX

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume
PAUL THEROUX

The kind of travel I do is a reaction to that. Instead of going to meet gorillas or Bhutan, I prefer...
PAUL THEROUX

The drug tour he had hoped would be unique, his own, ... was apparently a widely known trip down a w...
PAUL THEROUX

The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
PAUL THEROUX

The train passed fruit farms and clean villages and Swiss cycling in kerchiefs, calendar scenes that...
PAUL THEROUX

Riding the Iron Rooster.
PAUL THEROUX

Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.
PAUL THEROUX

You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw u...
PAUL THEROUX

Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and p...
PAUL THEROUX

I had cooperated. I could not have refused. I was smitten with her, half in love but also afraid, be...
PAUL THEROUX

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a go...
PAUL THEROUX

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.
PAUL THEROUX

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled
PAUL THEROUX

I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better
PAUL THEROUX

There are places that I've always wanted to go. First I went to Africa, and when I was there I r...
PAUL THEROUX

My father had an invisible job outside of the house; I didn't know what he did. But my kids were...
PAUL THEROUX

I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and ...
PAUL THEROUX

..luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you ...
PAUL THEROUX

The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity.
PAUL THEROUX

I don't look down on tourism. I live in Hawaii where we have 7 million visitors a year. If they ...
PAUL THEROUX

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing w...
PAUL THEROUX

People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for...
PAUL THEROUX

Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is m...
PAUL THEROUX

...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.
PAUL THEROUX

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
PAUL THEROUX

Nature is crooked. I wanted right angles and straight lines. Ice! Oh, why do they all drip? You cut ...
PAUL THEROUX

Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers -...
PAUL THEROUX

He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.
PAUL THEROUX

Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.
PAUL THEROUX

Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.
PHYLLIS THEROUX

As a BBC broadcaster, I really do hope that the new incarnation of 'Top Gear' with Chris Eva...
LOUIS THEROUX

L.A. is the opposite of Britain in a lot of respects, and that's what draws so many British peop...
LOUIS THEROUX

Writing is harder than acting. I enjoy acting for just the brevity with which you can be in the expe...
JUSTIN THEROUX

I think Donald Trump's had a pattern of leaping on the bandwagon of anything that he feels will ...
LOUIS THEROUX

Look after your body, because I'm 44, and things are happening that I never dreamed of - like ba...
LOUIS THEROUX

I did Chekhov's 'Three Sisters' once. Two months in, I remember going, 'Human beings...
JUSTIN THEROUX

Perhaps it's understandable to be more jaded on one's second exposure to something strange.
LOUIS THEROUX

I think of myself as being quite affable, approachable, fairly easy to get to know.
LOUIS THEROUX

There is no shame is being ambivalent about almost everything in your life.
LOUIS THEROUX

We have a double agenda of trying to deliver something exciting that people will talk about and will...
LOUIS THEROUX

The best way for guys to communicate is just don't talk to each other for nine hours. That's...
JUSTIN THEROUX

I think this is what hooks one to gardening: it is the closest one can come to being present at crea...
PHYLLIS THEROUX

When you're wanting to delve into something, it's the one thing that cable television lets y...
JUSTIN THEROUX

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.
ALEXANDER THEROUX

Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.
ALEXANDER THEROUX

Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people.
ALEXANDER THEROUX

Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?
ALEXANDER THEROUX

Silence [is] the unbearable repartee.
ALEXANDER THEROUX

It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his...
ALEXANDER THEROUX

The parrot holds its food for prim consumption as daintily as any debutante, [with] a predilection f...
ALEXANDER THEROUX

September: it was the most beautiful of words, he'd always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, a...
ALEXANDER THEROUX

A lot of money could be saved if we ate urban wildlife.
LOUIS THEROUX

Clearly I'm able to read emotions. But I do feel... What is it? Awkwardness. I'm not a slick...
LOUIS THEROUX

I think people are so immersed in the anti-Scientology mindset by consuming tabloid media and storie...
LOUIS THEROUX

If you chase fame, you make bad choices. Being famous isn't interesting.
JUSTIN THEROUX

There are fear mongers who talk about Islam as somehow it is an incubator of hate... remember Christ...
LOUIS THEROUX

The Village has such an eclectic appearance that is refreshing to look at. You go to brand-new subdi...
BILL THEROUX

It is an example of two hands coming together.
BILL THEROUX

No sooner did we put in sidewalks and lighting and houses started to sell. People moved in.
BILL THEROUX

It's a real success story. It really is unique. I know of no comparable area in Florida. We have a r...
BILL THEROUX

Although my dad's a writer, we grew up in a telly-watching household. I never found him disparag...
LOUIS THEROUX

I have been to a few A-list parties, but not massively. It's not my life, but it's fun dippi...
LOUIS THEROUX

Sometimes people think I'm sort of a Machiavelli who is thinking, 'How can I disarm people? ...
LOUIS THEROUX

It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating...
ALEXANDER THEROUX

When was the last time you were super offended? I might be like, 'That's the dumbest thing I...
JUSTIN THEROUX

To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart.
PHYLLIS THEROUX

Big game hunters and the hunting industry in South Africa know a lot of people regard what they do a...
LOUIS THEROUX

Not counting the brand of Sunni Islam practised by the so-called Islamic State, there is probably no...
LOUIS THEROUX

I am genuinely a bit confused about the world, a little bit bumbling.
LOUIS THEROUX

Meeting forensic patients for the first time could occasionally be an unnerving experience. They oft...
LOUIS THEROUX

I know firsthand how much work has usually gone into a screenplay, so if there's something that ...
JUSTIN THEROUX

When you don't have access to a subject, and all you have is ex-members and critics, there is th...
LOUIS THEROUX

Funnily enough, the most danger I felt was when I did a story about exotic animals kept as pets in A...
LOUIS THEROUX

I feel like, if there's an elephant in the room, I'd really like to start off by introducing...
LOUIS THEROUX

In my normal way of doing things, there's a little bit of 'going native' that takes plac...
LOUIS THEROUX

As a father of two children, I am used to seeing kids in the midst of a five-alarm meltdown over the...
LOUIS THEROUX

I never misrepresent my position - you've got to be strong enough to make the argument and marsh...
LOUIS THEROUX

I always go to bed thinking I'm the luckiest guy in the world.
JUSTIN THEROUX

In the past, I've tried to show the human side of people involved in stigmatised or misunderstoo...
LOUIS THEROUX

He said it hit him travelling one time in the year or so before he met my mother. Whatever country o...
MARCEL THEROUX

Sometimes I feel a bit socially disconnected in terms of being a little bit gullible about how peopl...
LOUIS THEROUX

Empires will come and go. The Soviet Union collapses; China can become a superpower, but 'Blue P...
LOUIS THEROUX

I really do try not to emote. I don't like seeing it on documentaries - it seems a bit unprofess...
LOUIS THEROUX

Sometimes you shoot for 40 or 50 hours for a one-hour show, and you have to make some very hard choi...
LOUIS THEROUX

I've discovered I am quite a puritanical person.
LOUIS THEROUX

I was always attracted and repelled by the idea of being a writer.
LOUIS THEROUX

Silence is the unbearable repartee.
ALEXANDER THEROUX

It's difficult to describe the weirdness of speaking to a man who appears to be perfectly in con...
LOUIS THEROUX

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how m...
ALEXANDER THEROUX

True believers of Scientology seem to know with utmost certainty that they have found the answer to ...
LOUIS THEROUX

The thing is, I have never been that confident, and, um, I have a lot of self-doubt, and I had never...
LOUIS THEROUX

I don't feel that as human beings we have an obligation to dislike someone based on their belief...
LOUIS THEROUX

I've always found it funny in life when you meet people who are incredibly stupid and incredibly...
JUSTIN THEROUX

There have been times when I've felt inappropriately emotional. I remember making 'The Most ...
LOUIS THEROUX

He didn't seem conventionally insane in any way that I could understand. But there was no way of com...
MARCEL THEROUX

The documentary genre, shows like 'Making a Murderer' and 'The Jinx' on HBO, there&#...
LOUIS THEROUX

I've always seen TV as... it didn't occupy the same rarefied space as literature, but it'...
LOUIS THEROUX

If I had to write long-form stuff with descriptions of rooms, it would be so boring for me. I like w...
JUSTIN THEROUX

I think everybody carries a slight sense of being different, and I know that it comes very naturally...
LOUIS THEROUX

There's always a negotiation that goes on to persuade people we are coming to the subject with a...
LOUIS THEROUX

Do I care about clothes and stuff? Not much. It's a bit sick, isn't it, people spending all ...
LOUIS THEROUX

For publicity purposes, everything gets simplified, and the fact that I wear glasses and am somewhat...
LOUIS THEROUX

It's like, once you've seen Tom Hanks win the Golden Globes, the Oscars, you've seen his...
JUSTIN THEROUX

I don't go around saturated in guilt or anything like that. I do worry about things quite a lot,...
LOUIS THEROUX

Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?
ALEXANDER THEROUX

On the list of qualities necessary to humans trying to make our way through life, truth scores fairl...
LOUIS THEROUX

But people don't change their beliefs easily. Even when their deepest convictions are challenged - b...
LOUIS THEROUX

She said. "I actually had my butt torn a few weeks ago. But it's like any job. You have good days an...
LOUIS THEROUX

I suppose there won't be any Mexican food in the whites-only homeland,' I said.
Hm, I'd never ...
LOUIS THEROUX

Now, with no hate group to run, Jerry spent his days playing Mah-jong on his computer
LOUIS THEROUX

It's an industry of lonely people in a crowd, Bill Margold was saying. 'They're scared to get close ...
LOUIS THEROUX

The world is a stage we walk upon. We are all in a way fictional characters who write ourselves with...
LOUIS THEROUX

How odd, I thought, that even though I don't believe it still feels nice to be included.
LOUIS THEROUX

Children are born with imaginations in mint condition, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound...
PHYLLIS THEROUX

September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows,...
ALEXANDER THEROUX

Writing is not only a reflection of what one thinks and feels but a rope one weaves with words that ...
PHYLLIS THEROUX

My first paying job might have been doing a play, actually. My mom paid me to dress up as a flounder...
PAUL DANO

We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they ...
PAUL TILLICH

Show class, have pride, and display character. If you do, winning takes care of itself.
PAUL BRYANT

Mr. President how long must women wait to get their liberty? Let us have the rights we deserve.
ALICE PAUL

The shortage of buyers, which the world is suffering from, is readily understood, not as due to peop...
PAUL DIRAC

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They ...
PAUL DIRAC

It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and...
PAUL DIRAC

I should like to suggest to you that the cause of all the economic troubles is that we have an econo...
PAUL DIRAC

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that n...
PAUL DIRAC

Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star.
PAUL DIRAC

Civilisation was built around wheat, around people settling down and not being nomadic. Baking is on...
PAUL HOLLYWOOD

As an opinion manager, a campaign consultant, fixing personality negatives is a lot easier than fixi...
PAUL MANAFORT

What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much.
PAUL SAMUELSON

No matter where you put me, I don't care if it is North Carolina, Florida, California, New York ...
CHRIS PAUL

The conscience of children is formed by the influences that surround them; their notions of good and...
JEAN PAUL

If my son is happy, then I am happy.
CHRIS PAUL

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
PAUL VALERY

Each one of my budgets has taken a meat axe to foreign aid, because I think we ought to quit sending...
RAND PAUL

I don't think I've ever used the word 'gay rights,' because I don't really belie...
RAND PAUL

Does the owner of the restaurant own his restaurant? Or does the government own his restaurant?
RAND PAUL

People say America is exceptional. I agree, but it's not the complexion of our skin or the twist...
RAND PAUL

I think public awareness of how good vaccines are for kids and how they are good for public health i...
RAND PAUL

Some Libertarians argue that Western occupation fans the flames of radical Islam; I agree. But I don...
RAND PAUL

You can't solve a dignity problem with military force.
RAND PAUL

As a Christian, I believe in redemption. And I believe in second chances.
RAND PAUL

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

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Paul Theroux

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

Paul Theroux

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